Society & Culture - Posted by Brevy Cannon-U. Virginia on Tuesday, November 20, 2012 12:40 - 8 Comments 
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(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...US families split among four ‘cultures’
"Though largely invisible, these family cultures are powerful, constituting the worlds that children are raised in, and may well be more consequential than parenting styles," says project co-director James Davison Hunter. (Credit: "kids in backseat" via Shutterstock)
U. VIRGINIA (US) — American kids are growing up in one of four cultures—family types that go beyond basic demographics—a new study finds.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
Researchers from the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture presented their findings on Thursday at a national conference in Washington, DC.
Each type represents a complex configuration of moral beliefs, values, and dispositions—often implicit and rarely articulated in daily life—largely independent of basic demographic factors, such as race, ethnicity, and social class, the study reports.
Straight from the Source
Most parenting research of the past 30 years, which undergirds notions of “tiger mothers” and “helicopter parents,” has been based in psychology and focused on parenting styles, says project co-director James Davison Hunter, professor of religion, culture and social theory and executive director of the institute.
This study, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, goes beyond parenting styles “to tell the complex story of parents’ habits, dispositions, hopes, fears, assumptions, and expectations for their children,” Hunter says.
“Though largely invisible, these family cultures are powerful, constituting the worlds that children are raised in, and may well be more consequential than parenting styles,” he says.
The report is based on data collected in two stages from September 2011 through March 2012, explains project co-director Carl Desportes Bowman, director of survey research at the institute.
First, a nationally representative sample of 3,000 parents of school-aged children completed an online one-hour survey. Then follow-up, in-person interviews were conducted with 101 of the survey respondents. The 90-minute interviews complemented the survey with open-ended questions designed to elicit parents’ implicit and explicit strategies and assumptions.
Four family cultures
The many factors that make up family cultures were distilled using the statistical technique of data cluster analysis to reveal four different family culture types:
1. The Faithful
The Faithful (20 percent of American parents) adhere to a divine and timeless morality, handed down through Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, giving them a strong sense of right and wrong.
Understanding human nature as “basically sinful” and seeing moral decline in the larger society, including in the public schools, the Faithful seek to defend and multiply the traditional social and moral order by creating it within their homes and instilling it in their children, with support from their church community.
Raising “children whose lives reflect God’s purpose” is a more important parenting goal than their children’s eventual happiness or career success.
2. Engaged Progressives
For Engaged Progressives (21 percent of parents), morality centers on personal freedom and responsibility. Having sidelined God as morality’s author, Engaged Progressives see few moral absolutes beyond the Golden Rule. They value honesty, are skeptical about religion, and are often guided morally by their own personal experience or what “feels right” to them.
Politically liberal and the least religious of all family types, they are generally optimistic about today’s culture and their children’s prospects. Aiming to train their children to be “responsible choosers,” Engaged Progressives strategically allow their children freedom at younger ages than other parents.
By age 14, their children have complete information about birth control, by 15 they are surfing the Web without adult supervision, and by age 16 they are watching R-rated movies.
3. The Detached
The parenting strategy of The Detached (19 percent of parents) can be summarized as: Let kids be kids and let the cards fall where they may.
The Detached are primarily white parents with blue-collar jobs, no college degree, and lower household income. Pessimistic about the future and their children’s opportunities, they report lower levels of marital happiness, and do not feel particularly close to their children. They feel they are in a “losing battle with all the other influences out there” and it shows in their practices.
They spend less than two hours a day interacting with their children, they do not routinely monitor their children’s homework, and they report lower grades for their children. When they do have dinner together as a family it is often in front of the TV.
4. American Dreamers
American Dreamers (27 percent of parents) are defined by their optimism about their children’s abilities and opportunities. These parents, with relatively low household income and education, pour themselves into raising their children and providing them every possible material and social advantage.
They also invest much effort protecting them from negative social influences and shaping their children’s moral character. This is the most common family culture among blacks and Hispanics, with each group making up about a quarter of American Dreamers.
American Dreamers describe their relationships with their children as “very close” and express a strong desire to be “best friends” with their children once they are grown.
Major trends
Contrary to much popular discussion of “the death of character,” American parents of all stripes want their children to become loving, honest, and responsible adults of high moral character.
Despite a widespread perception among parents that American family life has declined since they were growing up, parents report that their own families and children are doing very well.
Unlike many parents in the 1960s who faced a “generation gap,” today’s parents believe their children largely share their values. Most family arguments and strife revolve around mundane, day-to-day issues like doing chores.
Many parents are less confident in authoritarian forms of discipline, so they turn to constant communication and close relationships to influence their children. Parents walk the fine line of wanting to be strict, but also wanting to be close friends and confidants of their children.
While parents worry about all sorts of challenges to their children’s development and vitality, they are unlikely to identify their own children as struggling with such challenges, including obesity, below-average academic performance, drugs or alcohol, or other risky behaviors. This “not my kids” reality gap may be linked to parental closeness and identification with their children.
Most parents are effectively “going it alone,” and report a very thin support network.
Many parents feel helpless to keep negative external influences at bay as children gain ever-increasing exposure and access to the Internet, on-demand movies, Facebook, and other technologies.
Source: University of Virginia
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8 Comments
Robert
CalebGT
Robert
Oops…”The Golden Rule” predates Judeo-Christian traditions. Shouldn’t have sidelined my studies.
Marcia
So many things determine who our kids become, but surely family culture is the most important. http://tootzypop.com/culture/the-spiker-games/
One has to wonder what kind of questions were asked to gather such “specific” data. Clearly it is impossible to categorize all families into only four groups. I have raised my six children to be faithful Catholics, but we believe that leads to happiness not replaces it. Happiness itself is a vague term. Aristotle spent much of his book, Nicomachean Ethics, just defining this term. Whereas I respect much from the University of Virginia, my husband’s alma mater, I resist studies that subdivide complex human behaviors into simplistic groupings.
Asa
What are the other 13% of American parents like? Maybe too busy planning how their child could be the next Honey Boo Boo to respond to the survey…
Greg
It would be interesting to interview these parents about their parents style of rearing to see how parenting has shifted over generations. My own family’s style is not reflected here. My family was partly detached and partly dreamers but with deep stock in the history and meaning of being a member of our family. In many ways this sense replaced religious faith. So too, I am curious about the missing 13%. Is it the grey area between these four peaks or a leaning whose sample was not quite large enough for mention?
Interpretive sociological research such as this tries to strike a balance between distilling the general pattern and providing enough depth/detail that the portrait does not become overly simplistic or reductionistic. The full 16-page description of these four family cultures can be downloaded at: http://iasc-culture.org/survey_archives/IASC_CAF_ExecReport.pdf . I guarantee you that it is more complex than can be captured in a brief press release.
The other 13% of parents in the study displayed patterns of response that did not fit clearly into any of the four family cultures. They therefore remained unclassified, rather than trying to fit them into a category that didn’t serve them well.
It is important to note that the four family cultures described in this study highlight significant cultural differences between American families. But within each culture there is considerable diversity. And some families, as Greg points out, don’t fit as squarely into a particular type as do others. As is true for any general label — capitalism versus socialism, Evangelical versus progressive Protestant, liberal versus conservative — typological distinctions are generally tidier than the complicated realities of people’s lives that they attempt to summarize. Typologies perform a useful interpretive function, but they never capture all the particularity of specific families or individuals.
Ironically, the “Engaged Progressives see few moral absolutes beyond the Golden Rule” which comes straight from the Judeo-Christian tradition that they have “sidelined.”